The band Eddie Van Halen always wanted to sound like
There’s no sense in trying to replicate anything Eddie Van Halen did.
As much as people like the idea of making their own version of his tapping licks and trying to keep up with every second of one of their instrumentals, there’s no sense in trying to copy him when the master already perfected everything before. But it’s not like Eddie didn’t have his fair share of heroes that he wanted to match when he was making the band’s classic records as well.
In fact, Eddie managed to wear a lot of those influences on his sleeve without many people noticing. He was a child of the blues, and even though Eric Clapton might not be the first person that comes to mind when listening to their music, it’s easy to look at a handful of those tapping licks and hear him going down the blues scale on one string the same way that ‘Slowhand’ used to when he was in his prime.
But there was a lot more to explore on the neck than a couple of bluesy tricks. By the late 1970s, countless guitarists were making strange musical detours like Allan Holdsworth and Frank Zappa, but Eddie was one of the first to make all those tricks sound like the coolest thing in the world. Most guitarists were no strangers to harmonics, but the way that Eddie used them on tracks like ‘Top Jimmy’ made the guitar sound like some sort of bell-like instrument rather than a bunch of wires on a piece of wood.
A lot of what Eddie created sounded like it was from another planet, but it took a long time for him to get to that standard. They were nothing more than a scrappy bunch of kids looking to play the heaviest music possible, and even when they got the co-sign from Gene Simmons on their first few demos, getting everything right in the studio for that debut record wasn’t going to be easy.
Many of the songs on their debut record were them recreating their live set, and while there were hardly any overdubs, that’s probably intentional. Producer Ted Templeman always knew talent when he saw it, and the magic that the band had tearing through tracks like ‘Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love’ and ‘Atomic Punk’ is among the most feral rock and roll of its time. But Eddie had standards for his sound, and he felt that one band had the kind of overall sound he wanted to hear.
As much as Eddie loved to experiment, he remembered being a little bit dejected knowing that their initial demos didn’t sound half as powerful as Led Zeppelin’s first records, saying, “We popped it into the player in my van and expected to hear Led Zeppelin coming out, but we were kind of appalled by what we heard. It just didn’t sound the way we wanted it to sound. The first album sounds a little better, but it still wasn’t the way we imagined it should sound. It’s very unique sounding. I wouldn’t even know how to duplicate it, to tell you the truth.”
Then again, expecting anyone to play with as much power as John Bonham just isn’t fair. Alex Van Halen had more than enough power to drive every single tune forward, but when looking at the band’s track record later, they would make up for that on the next few records, especially when they hunkered down on Women and Children First and created the closest answer to Zeppelin than most people were going to hear that decade.
Even if Eddie had mixed emotions about the band’s humble beginnings, the fact that he set that high of a standard for himself spoke volumes about where they were going to be going. The band wanted to be one of the best that ever was, and before they even entered the ‘Van Hagar’ era, they were already well above anything that any other group could hope to accomplish at the time.
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